20 Years of EVAlabs
Symposium & Summer School 2024
20 Years of EVAlabs Symposium
To mark 20 years of the Empirical Visual Aesthetics Lab (EVAlab), founded by Helmut Leder in 2004 as the first department dedicated to Visual Empirical Aesthetics, we celebrated with a symposium (20–21 September 2024) and a summer school (22–23 September 2024).
The festivities opened with a welcome reception featuring Marcos Nadal (University of the Balearic Islands), who reflected on the evolution of empirical aesthetics and on Leder’s and the EVAlab’s pioneering contributions to understanding the psychological and neural foundations of aesthetic experience and the arts.
The symposium itself offered both a retrospective on two decades of Visual Empirical Aesthetics and a forward-looking perspective on the field’s future directions.
Helmut Leder and Matthew Pelowski during their presentation on September 21, 2024, at the opening of the panel discussion “EVAlabs: A Look Back and Ahead” as part of the symposium “20 Years of EVAlabs” (September 20–21, 2024) in the SkyLounge at the University of Vienna.
20 Years of EVAlabs Summer School
The summer school brought together international PhD students and early post-docs to engage closely with leading figures in the field, EVAlab scientists, and invited experts. Organised with the support of VDS CoBeNe doctoral researchers, the two-day programme combined lectures, seminars, a hands-on eye-tracking workshop, and networking, including a social dinner at Badeschiff Wien. Designed to foster collaboration and exchange, it offered an ideal balance of focused learning and informal discussion, enabling young researchers to present ideas, gain insight into ongoing projects, and lay the groundwork for future cross-generational collaborations.
Group photo with the participants of the EVAlabs Summer School on September 22–23, 2024, on the occasion of the 20 Years of EVAlabs Symposium, along with Helmut Leder and Matthew Pelowski, in Lecture Hall G of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna.